...and its antidote

posted by tom / December 23, 2004 /

Good for the EFF. They've put some money behind an open-source project called Tor that might do a lot to stymy anti-P2P efforts. It's basically a SOCKS proxy -- install it on your computer (linux, windows, os x) and you'll join an ad-hoc P2P routing network. When you send a request from a given application -- your web browser, IM, BitTorrent, almost anything -- it'll be encrypted and sent through a random series of peers in the network to disguise where it's coming from. This isn't foolproof, for a number of reasons that are better explained by the project wiki, but it'll be fine for most uses.

However, Tor is also a potential liability: while the whole point of the system is that a user doesn't know what traffic is going through his system, that doesn't mean the law won't try to hold you responsible for it. Some Tor users have reported getting C&D letters for traffic that didn't belong to them. It seems unlikely that you could be held responsible for other people's traffic that gets routed through your system -- industry lawyers have tried this already, and the courts, realizing that it could mean the end of the internet, have arrived at an at least somewhat-agreeable detente with the ISPs. However, you probably don't want to be the first person to go through the process of confirming my hunch. So: caveat emp-Tor.

Comments

This is starting to remind me of an old Wile E. Coyote cartoons. If you're on the industry side you have to realize that everything you can do is always just one step behind the people you're opposing, and by the time you stop what they're doing the next innovation is already on the fringes waiting to be implemented. At what point do they just give up and save the money in court costs?

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